The Math of YouTube

Can we talk about YouTube for a few minutes? Whether you think of it as a blight on humanity or the answer to a prayer, it’s not going away. The question you could be asking, though, is whether or not it’s relevant to your business. It’s sometimes hard to get an answer when there’s so much breathless hype built up around it.

All the marketing gurus use the same statistics to blow your mind (and soften you up.) And the YouTube stats are kind of stunning. I’ve quoted a few of them just recently.

3 billion views per day
48 hours of video uploaded every minute
700 billion playbacks in 2010.

I could go on and on. But here’s one statistic you probably won’t hear from anyone else. The video with the highest number of views of all time is Justin Bieber’s “Baby”, the first video to hit 500 million views, while simultaneously being one of the most disliked videos of all time.

So it seems a lot of people are going to YouTube to be entertained, and when they aren’t, they complain. I know you don’t want to play that game. Neither do I. Trying to entertain 18 year old boys while selling architectural services just doesn’t make any sense.

I especially don’t want to get millions of views for a terrible video, or even worse, a great video for someone in my market, but not someone else’s market.

This is further evidence that what I’ve been telling you for some time is true. Raw views mean very little. On the other hand, targeted views mean everything! So learning how to target your videos is the holy grail. You’ve got to let your people find you. There’s just no other substitute.

But what does this have to do with YouTube?
Does this Justin Bieber dust-up mean that YouTube is really just a destination for fidgety 18-25 year old males? Well, not quite. In fact, YouTube may just be the most egalitarian of social networking sites. If you look at the statistics by age, you find that every group has an almost equal share of the pie. Here they are according to the latest Nielson/NetRatings:

Age Groups on YouTube

<18 = 18%
18 – 34 = 18%
35 – 44 = 20%
45 – 54 = 22%
55+ = 22%

Hm. More people 55 and over are using YouTube than the under 18 crowd. Interesting.

Women use YouTube more than men, though not by much. 52% for women and 48% for men, according to the most recent research from the annual study by Ignite Media.

So what does all this mean?

It means we have a level playing field

This is something of a miracle in today’s economy because these days when a market opportunity is revealed, it usually doesn’t take the huge corporations long to monopolize it, or try to. But this time around, it isn’t working that way. In fact, they struggle with it. So it makes sense to investigate exactly what the opportunity is for you. I’d like to help with that.

Let’s play a little thought game. Say you have a consulting business that caters to women 55 and older who have weight problems. You’ve listened to and watched me talk about video as an amazingly smart way to reach and connect with people. So now you wonder if YouTube might be a good potential tool after all. The big question is are the numbers there for your market?

The Math of YouTube
Simple arithmetic tells us that 52% (women) of the 22% (over age 55) of YouTube’s viewers are in your demographic. With a total universe of about 300 million viewers, we can pretty easily extract some useful numbers.

If we take 300 million total viewers and multiply that by 52%, we get 156 million female viewers. If we multiply that by the percentage of women in your target group (22%) we get 34,320,000 women probably using YouTube as a search engine.

What if you could speak to only one millionth of those women with a compelling message of support that builds instant rapport? So much so that they decide to take you up on your free consultation offer?

That would result in you speaking to 57 potentially perfect clients per day, or 343 per week. If you were able to turn some of those consultations into clients, what would that mean for your business?

Let’s say your closing ratio is only 30%. That brings you 102 new clients per week. At roughly $200 per client per month, that’s $81,600 per month per batch of new clients, or $6,404,400 per year. (From 4896 clients per year)

But really, that’s too much work and probably impossible to do anyway with any degree of excellence. After all, who wants to be talking 24 hours a day? So cut it back to 1/10 of that. That still comes to $640,440 per year with 489 clients.

And, being that these are mostly perfect clients, what would that mean for the quality of your life?

This is how I see the potential of video for your business. Of course, maybe your market is not made up of mostly over-55 females. Not everyone can be that lucky. Maybe it’s 20-something males.

It doesn’t really matter. Whichever market you serve, the numbers are there to give you a business if your business has the potential to serve them.

And that’s just using a pure YouTube strategy. Video is even more powerful and flexible because it plays just as nicely with Facebook, email, blogs and your own website.

But there’s a big problem with video
So many people with your kind of business don’t think they have it in them to do video marketing. They have lots of reasons why, but almost all of them start with two dangerous myths about what it takes to make a profitable video.

In the free resource I would like to give you now, we’ve laid these myths out in detail and shown you exactly what you can do heal your thinking to take advantage of this gift of video.

Yes, I believe video is a gift to mankind every bit as much as the Salk vaccine. It will create more profitable businesses in the 21st century than ever before. And we need small business to fill the vacuum that is going to be left by the huge institutions that are becoming less viable each day.

I’ll do my little part. Right now you can actually get started with a massive video series on video marketing training. The great majority of this will never go out of style because it’s based on timeless principles. It’s explained in non-technical language. It’s free. If you decide to go all the way through to the end, there’s a bonus to end all bonuses. This is not hype. But you won’t know about it unless you get all the way through the series.

It all starts here
The free video series is at sellonsite.net. Watch it, then start planning your YouTube strategy.